When this new version of SACRE DU PRINTEMPS appeared in the 1990s, the world of dance rubbed its eyes in astonishment: For a century, the key work of modernism had been
interpreted as the sacrifice of the individual which the masses must ritually destroy. The struggle between female and male, individual and group, appeared inextricably linked to the subject
matter. With a single multiplied prop on the stage, a young Canadian suddenly offered a completely different version: Set to Igor Stravinsky’s original music, she prolongs time to a continuum.
Everything takes place at once. "It is as if I were dealing with the very moment after the instant life first appeared,” says the choreographer. “The performance is the unfolding of that
moment.”

It was fun, imaginative and utterly captivating. The Chronicle Herald

Huge and in black-and-white: When Marie Chouinard held the book by the painter and poet HENRI MICHAUX :MOUVEMENTS in her hands for the first
time, she immediately read his abstract-surreal ink drawings as a kind of choreography. She has meanwhile “translated” it page by page into dance. Projected tall as a building, the audience can
follow the inspiring dialogue between image and movement at every moment: Effervescent beings appear and vanish again. Towering flows of ink become narrower, while a female dancer almost
disappears in the vertical between the pages. Electrified, thighs spiral up from their joints, a figure hurriedly tiptoes out of sight. Everyone rushes through the scenery in their very own
manner, one traverses the room backwards on the knees of another accompanied by a lashing sound collage. Seemingly endless associations arise, surprising correspondences, explosions of human
expression. Who is this polymorphic being?

Marie Chouinard, the current director of the dance section of the Venice Biennale, is known for her idiosyncratic movement language – energetically explosive in the expansion of
space, technically highly skilled, permeated by amusing allusions to the history of dance. In 2016, the Quebecer Marie Chouinard received the Canadian Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for
her lifetime achievement.